When Carmen Argote was 17, her father took off for Guadalajara, Mexico, back to his hometown and his dream of living in a house he had designed for himself and his family. However, his wife felt quite settled in Los Angeles—their two children had grown up here, her...
Los Angeles–based artist April Bey fuses her fine arts education with a background in design to create rule-based hybrid works that intertwine a host of materials such as caulking, resin and wood along with low quality sewing needles, thread and Hitarget wax fabric,...
On the evening of June 25, 2016, a group of gorgeous mutants rushed out of The Broad museum and began loving themselves and each other on South Grand Avenue. This band of performers, known collectively as Mutant Salon, is run by the LA-based visionary artist Young...
The wave of women coming forward with accounts of sexual harassment and assault has swept the art world like the Santa Ana winds in a California brush fire, and all I have to say is “Finally.” Historically, women have served as objects of sexual desire within the...
Cheyenne artist Edgar Heap of Birds has made a practice of illuminating Native-American life against dominant culture erasure. In his recent LA-area exhibitions at Garis & Hahn and the Pitzer College Galleries, he focused on activism and history. You tell...
The following photographs are the finalists from Artillery's May/June contest. The winner is Alberto Mesirca (seen above and first in the photo gallery; also in the print version of Artillery, May/June, 2018). Congratulations to Alberto Mesirca and our finalists....
LOS ANGELES: A FAIR DESTINATION This winter The Other Art Fair (March 15–18) tested its feet in LA waters—launched by Saatchi Art, the online art gallery, the fair is billed as “An Art Fair for a New Generation of Art Buyers.” On the weekend the crowds came in droves...
Censorship of art must always bear a high burden—especially after an entire generation of work was nearly destroyed by the Nazis’ war on Modern Art (which they labeled “degenerate art”), involving confiscation of thousands of artworks, including those of Beckmann,...
When I initially started hearing the buzz surrounding filmmaker brothers Chapman and Maclain Way’s Netflix documentary series about the Indian guru Bhagwan Rajneesh’s failed attempt to establish a large commune in rural Oregon in the 1980s, I was surprised—hasn’t this...
I know a curator who used to work for Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen—her job was to look through all the old press clippings and organize them. “That must’ve been interesting,” I said, “did you notice anything?” “Well,” she said “in the ’60s, Carolee...
Andy Warhol was not a weak, whiney, limp-wristed gay man. Quite the opposite, in fact: he had different personalities for different people. To his nieces and nephews, he was your normal uncle Andy; they loved him and wrote a storybook about how they would wake up...
When they write the official history of artists who experimented with gender fluidity, Eva & Adele should rightfully get their own chapter. At an art fair or posh party over the last three decades, you may have encountered a pair of bald ladies attired in...
FREE FOR NOTHING DEAR BABS: I am writing to you because I’m outraged at the $25 ticket price for the Jasper Johns show currently at the “free” Broad museum. That is not even close to free, and with the exclusive exhibition sponsor Louis Vuitton, why is the ticket...
That Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are both having retrospective exhibitions in California concurrently, at The Broad in Los Angeles and San Francisco MOMA respectively, is undoubtedly coincidental, yet the timing seems just right. Both artists were part of a...
Romanian-born, having lived through the tragic absurdities of communism, Geta Bratescu represents the strongest blending of conceptual rigor and narrative impulses. Her wide-ranging oeuvre encompasses drawing, sculpture, video, performance, collage and animated film....